The Sugar Dragon

by Victoria Gordon

  Her frustrations were only increased when she found that Con had — miraculously — matched her own standards of style so well that there wasn’t a single word she could change in the editing of the column. Not one! She was so thoroughly disgusted by the time she’d finished with the page layout that she considered for a moment tearing up her carefully-drawn logo and substituting something else, but then she realised the author of the despicable column would know her displeasure, and probably relish the evidence. So she pinned the logo carefully to the copy and sent it all off to be prepared.

  Then, pleading a headache, she went off to have some coffee and try and soothe her shattered composure.

  The paper was well and truly put to bed by the time Verna left for home that afternoon, and clearly the Bib’n’Tucker column had already been circulated throughout the building. As she walked through on her way to the parking lot, she could feel the stares and hear the giggles as the rest of the staff laughed at her.

  And seeing it actually in print the next day didn’t help matters. Both Dave and Jennifer made an admirable attempt to restrain their own laughter when they read the column, but they were too young to do it well, and certainly not well enough to hide it from Verna.

  ‘I suppose you two think it’s absolutely hilarious?’ she demanded in a fit of pique that left both of them staring at their desks with hangdog expressions and down-cast eyes. It was Jennifer, slightly the bolder of the two, who finally looked up and said, ‘It is, actually.’

  Their sheepish expressions quickly melted Verna’s anger, at least at them, and she found herself smiling her response. ‘I suppose so,’ she said, ‘but when I get my hands on Mr Con Bradley he won’t think it’s so smart ... or funny.’

  But she didn’t get a chance to do anything with Con Bradley, because he neither telephoned nor visited the office personally. Which didn’t surprise Verna one bit.

  And certainly she didn’t need his presence to be reminded of him. Wherever she went in the building, it was to a chorus of jokes and smart remarks about Dragon Lady the Editor, as the various staff members did their own research into the new editor’s sense of humour.

  She knew that if she let them get her goat she’d be branded something even worse than Con Bradley’s portrait, so she tossed back smart cracks of her own and laughed right along with the others. But even so, it was a joke that quickly palled, and before the day was out she had lost all sense of humour about the situation.

  When Reg Williamson poked his nose into her office and made his own contribution to the hazing, she snapped back with a threat to turn him into a cane toad, and everybody could see by the fire in her eyes that she wasn’t kidding.

  By the following morning, a Thursday, the worst of it was over, and Verna’s temper had cooled to the degree that she graciously accepted a luncheon offer from Garry Fisher, the advertising manager, even when he’d prefaced it with a sly dig at her new title.

  Garry was a tall, ascetic-looking young man who looked far more like a scholar than a hard-bitten ad salesman, but he had a hard-sell reputation that was quickly borne out by the results he achieved, and Verna knew he was highly regarded in the town.

  He was clearly well known at the restaurant he took her to, and they were greeted effusively by the proprietor and his wife. The friendly greeting put Verna quite at ease, until Garry introduced her.

  The proprietor nodded wisely and said, ‘Ah, the Dragon Lady,’ and his wife nodded agreement and looked at Verna as if she expected her to bite.

  It got even worse when they sat down and ordered. A group of little old ladies across the room were chatting happily until one of them whispered something to the others and fumbled around to get her copy of the paper from her bulging handbag. Verna wouldn’t have noticed, except that their whispers were over-loud, perhaps because they were all hard of hearing, and the entire restaurant hej^ the smallest and sweetest-looking of the old girls saying, ‘But she doesn’t look like a dragon.’

  Pride kept Verna from leaping out of her seat and fleeing the scene. Pride, and the look of genuine joy on Garry’s face. He looked as if he’d like nothing better than to see her personally boost her outrageous reputation, even as he whispered, ‘You’re going to be famous, love. Give it another fortnight with that column and you’ll have your own fan club—and I’ll have restaurant ads coming out of my ears.’

  ‘Well, don’t hold your breath,’ she snapped. ‘Because I have no intention of ever being so much as in the same room as Con Bradley, let alone eating with him!’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so touchy,’ he replied. ‘Be honest, he’s got the paper to where it’ll be the talk of the town, and you get all the credit. Nothing the matter with that, love; if it was me, I’d be offering to buy him lunch once a week.’

  ‘And you’re welcome to him. Personally I don’t need to make myself a laughing stock just to sell newspapers. And I’d rather starve than give him another chance to ridicule me in my own paper!’

  The food arrived then, and conversation ceased as they dug in. It wasn’t until Verna had taken the first few bites of a rather pleasant prawn cocktail that she suddenly realised it wasn’t only their own conversation that had stopped, but almost everybody else’s as well. Glancing obliquely from the comer of her eye, she realised with growing horror that everybody was watching her.

  ‘For God’s sake, do they expect me to gobble it up like a dog, or what?’ she hissed at Garry, who was obviously enjoying his own plate of oysters mornay.

  ‘Probably,’ he replied with studied nonchalance. ‘People tend to believe exactly what they read in the paper — you should know that Maybe if you put the dish on die floor—’

  Verna’s vengeful glare cut him off in mid-sentence, and he looked uncomfortably down at his food before resuming. ‘I’m sorry; that was a bit much. Would you like to go?’

  ‘Not on your Nelly,’ she muttered through clenched teeth. ‘That would really do it up right. No, I shall stay and see it through, using my very best manners if you please. And to hell with the lot of them!’

  ‘Good girl! Never let the bastards get you down, I always say.’

  But it was easier said than done. Verna used her very best table manners, as promised, but they couldn’t compensate for fingers that trembled and a mouth that somehow moved just as the forkful of food reached it, or the wine glass that was slippery as quicksilver.

  She struggled through it, but by the end of the meal she’d dropped her fork twice, spilled gravy and wine both down the front of a new and expensive blouse, almost choked to death when a piece of fish went down the wrong way, and had spilled salt all over the table cloth.

  Worse, she knew that everybody in the place had observed and recorded each incident in glowing detail, and that she’d be the chief topic of conversation around dozens of dinner tables that evening. By the time she returned to her own office, she looked a total mess and felt like going off to hide somewhere. Faced with strange looks from Dave and Jennifer, she angrily shooed them off to find some ‘decent stories for a change,’ then slammed the office door shut, flung herself face-down on her desk, and cried her heart out.

  Twenty minutes later, her eyes swollen from weeping and her humiliation and anger condensed to a knot of wlite-hot rage in her stomach, she opened up the door again and returned to work. And she worked with a vengeance, driving herself and her staff throughout the rest of the week to the point where her Dragon Lady image became all too real inside the office.

  And at home, where her ‘black familiar’ took the brunt of Verna’s bad temper, the atmosphere was equally chilly as Verna plotted revenge after revenge upon Con Bradley.

  The following Monday she was back to normal, breezily into the office with a cheerful smile for everyone and even congratulations to Jennifer for her work on a particularly difficult story. Until noon. Or more correctly one p.m., when Verna returned from lunch to find Jennifer sitting at her desk with a look of rapture on her face.

  ‘Mr Bradley was
here,’ she breathed dreamily. ‘He left you a note. Gee, I don’t see why you hate him so much, he’s so handsome, and ... and ... well, everything!’

  ‘When you get to be my age, dear child, you’ll realise that being handsome means nothing at all,’ said Verna, feeling somewhat like a maiden aunt to the young journalist who was an exceptionally innocent twenty years of age.

  Seating herself at her own desk, she picked up the note, read, ‘Hoped to take you to lunch, but you’d gone,’ and crumpled the paper to throw it angrily into the waste-bin.

  ‘I’d starve first ... or poison your soup,’ she muttered angrily, then ripped open the other envelope to scan over Con’s restaurant column for that week. She could feel Jennifer’s eyes on her as she read it with growing anger and amazement, and she wasn’t surprised when the younger girl flinched with alarm as Verna flung the copy down on the desk and swore, ‘Bastard ... bastard … bastard!’

  She was halfway to Reg Williamson’s office, the copy in her trembling fingers, when she realised he was off to Brisbane for the day, and she turned back to her own office with a mumbled curse.

  Seated once again at her desk, she read over the column again, debating with herself if she actually dared throw it away.

  The content of this second instalment, centred this time around the very restaurant where Verna had endured her luncheon fiasco of the previous Thursday, was no worse than the first column. Only this time she was reported to have impaled olives on her talons, snorted candles alight from across the room, decried the lack of flying fox on the menu, and eaten a steak so rare that it kept jumping off the plate. Worse, he’d somehow heard of her wine-spilling and gravy-dripping accomplishments and had included them, as well.

  ‘Can I read it, please?’ Jennifer asked meekly from across the room.

  ‘What?’ Verna roared her question at the girl, who looked down at her desk with the suggestion of a tear in the comer of her eye.

  ‘I only want to read it,’ she said quietly, and then, with astonishing and somewhat indignant anger, ‘I know you don’t like it, but I expect I’ll find it quite funny, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t read it.’

  The look in Jennifer’s eyes brought Verna down to earth rather quickly, and she scolded herself for taking her own bad temper out on Jennifer. It wasn’t Jennifer’s fault that Con Bradley had this astounding power to shred Verna’s feelings like so much cabbage.

  ‘Of course you can read it,’ Verna said gently, rising to pass the offensive copy over to Jennifer. Then she returned to her desk and got busy laying out her final pages, trying to avoid watching Jennifer’s reaction to the column.

  A difficult task, not only because she was subconsciously aware of the girl’s interest in the column, but because Jennifer made no attempt to hide her amusement. Like Reg Williamson the week before, she was giggling helplessly by the time she’d finished.

  Then she brought the copy back to Verna, and said with a perfectly straight face, ‘The lobster dish sounded quite tasty.’

  Verna looked up to meet huge, soft brown eyes that fairly danced with compassion, and found her own anger incapable of resisting. As Jennifer’s mouth twitched with the attempt to keep a straight face, Verna felt her own mouth begin to quiver as well, and seconds later they were both howling with laughter.

  ‘But he’ll pay for this,’ Verna vowed through tears of laughter. ‘I don’t know how, but I’ll make him pay if it’s the last thing I ever do. The swine! I should go to lunch with him if he asks me, just so I could poison him, or slip hot peppers into his beef stroganoff or something.’

  ‘Well, don’t do anything too drastic,’ said Garry Fisher’s voice from the doorway. ‘He’s managed to triple our restaurant advertising this week, and I’ve already more enquiries about next week. You’re going to have to boost it to twenty-four pages next week, if this is any indication.’

  ‘You’re joking!’ Verna didn’t — couldn’t — want to believe that much success for the column.

  ‘I never joke about money,’ he said very coldly, and the super-serious expression on his face made Verna want to start giggling all over again.

  ‘All right,’ she said, ‘but if I don’t get this final page laid out, you’ll have a late paper on your hands, and your advertisers won’t like that.’

  ‘Our advertisers,’ he said pointedly, turning to leave the room.

  Verna stuck her tongue out at his retreating back, causing a spate of giggling from Jennifer, then sat down to the serious business of wrapping up the paper for another week. It was just on five o’clock when she finished, and despite the air-conditioning she was hot and exhausted.

  *I feel like a limp dishrag,’ she said to Jennifer, who was clearing away her desk in preparation to go home.

  ‘Me too. A beer would sure go down right,’ said the young journalist. ‘What do you reckon?’

  ‘I reckon that’s a terrific idea,’ Verna replied honestly. ‘But only one, because I’ve got a hungry dog waiting at home.’

  In actual fact, they had two each and Verna quite enjoyed the break, despite one of the tape operators greeting her with a shout of ‘Yea, Dragon Lady,’ when they entered the pub.

  That evening she took Sheba on a lengthy stroll down the beach, consciously avoiding the area where she had encountered Con Bradley — or had she? — on that fateful morning that seemed like only yesterday. And she did the same during the next few nights and the one morning when she rose early enough for a stroll. Then she decided it was silly to avoid the area, since the sheer fact of avoiding it made her think about Con and their first meeting anyway.

  ‘And besides,’ she told herself in the mirror after suddenly bouncing into wide-awake energy at three-thirty in the morning on Sunday after a boring, boring Saturday night at home, ‘it’s bad enough he slanders me in my own newspaper, without dictating where I can walk on the public beaches!’

  And having said it, she dragged Sheba out of a sound sleep, snapped on the dog’s leash, and deliberately set off for that memorable stretch of Kelly’s Beach.

  ‘And I hope you are there, Con Bradley,’ she said out loud. ‘Because I’ll not only steal your trousers, but everything else you could use to cover yourself as well. And if you just dare come out of the water after me again, I’ll throw rocks at you!’

  By the time she reached the spot of that first encounter, she had worked herself into such a state of nervousness and anger that even Sheba was growling at every passing shadow, but the display of ferocity was quite wasted, since there was nothing but shadows to appreciate it.

  Verna stayed in the area, watching the sun rise up out of the ocean in a beautiful, dreamlike sunrise, and felt strangely lonely and disappointed when she walked back along the beach behind the fleeting black shape of her dog.

  Stripping off shorts and T-shirt, she plunged into the shower after giving Sheba her breakfast, and luxuriated in a leisurely shower and shampoo before wandering out into the kitchen. Wrapped only in a towel that barely concealed her slender body, she was busy breaking eggs into the frying pan when a rap on the kitchen door made her turn in surprise.

  There was the briefest impression of a face looking through the screen at her before Verna realised that her towel was slipping, and she clasped at it frantically as she dashed for the bedroom. Even as she shrugged into clean shorts and a tank-top, fumbling in her haste, she couldn’t believe what her eyes had told her, until she returned to the kitchen and flung open the door.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ she demanded in her most authoritative voice.

  Eyes like chips of ice stared blandly back at her, and Con Bradley reached down to scratch Sheba’s back before he answered her.

  ‘Well, it’s a good tiling I didn’t come for breakfast, because your eggs are burning,’ he said with a slight grin, and Verna turned round and dashed back to rescue them, aware that he had followed her into the room.

  ‘You get out of here!’ She was shrieking like a fishwife and she knew
it, but she didn’t care. And obviously neither did he. He stood leaning casually against the refrigerator and watched her scraping hopelessly at the charred eggs.

  ‘It would probably help if you turned the heat off under them,’ he said calmly, and with tears of rage in her eyes, Verna turned around with the pan in her hand to fling at him. Only her wrist was caught in a grip of iron as he stepped forward in a single cat-like stride, and halted her.

  ‘Naughty, naughty,’ he said, shaking his head reprovingly. ‘Just think of the mess you’d have to clean up if you missed. Even Sheba wouldn’t eat that muck.’

  Verna made another attempt to free her hand, and when Con merely grinned at her, she reached out with the other hand and grappled for the billy on the other burner. But it was futile; Con merely reached out and captured that hand as well, which only brought her closer to him as he held her with arms wide spread.

  ‘Now settle down,’ he said softly, although Verna could feel the steel in his voice. ‘This is a helluva way to treat a man who comes to offer you a drive in the country and lunch as well.’

  ‘Lunch!’ The word emerged as a childish squeak that only fanned Verna’s anger. ‘I wouldn’t have lunch with you if ... if ...’

  ‘If you were starving, I suppose,’ he grinned. ‘And I suppose it’s all because of this column business, which I must say you’re taking extremely calmly.’

  ‘You let go of me and you’ll soon see how calm I am!’ she raged, struggling against his grip and wondering if she dared use her knee against his unprotected groin,

  ‘I wouldn’t try that,’ he said as if reading her mind. ‘Fun and games is one thing, but that just might make me angry.’ And then, to her absolute amazement, he let go both her hands at once and stepped lithely back out of immediate striking distance.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked again, her voice lifting with each word until it was little more than a squeal at the end of the question. ‘And how did you get here ... how did you know where I live?’